The summer lingered on and we took another weekend trip to Brighton, but the hut was to be closed in October, and when we went there to collect a few large items for my parents in the car, the first hint of autumn was present in the grey mist from the sea.
For a very few minutes we stood chatting to one of our neighbours at the hut, before we left. She mentioned the boy in the wheelchair, whom Robert had played ball with. He had been crippled by the lifesaving operation he had undergone as a baby. Not for the first time, I was filled with gratitude and relief that my own baby, though tiny, was perfect.
A plague of flies filled the air, and I was glad we had put the insect net over the carry-cot. We hurried away from the promenade, saying our goodbyes till next spring.
‘Take care of them, Michael,’ said our friend. ‘You’re a real family man now.’
14. At the First Stroke of Autumn
Autumn lived up to its reputation and, one morning, the mist was so bad that I turned the car homewards on the way to Robert’s playschool, saying that I dared not go any further. Usually, the morning mists gave way to brilliantly sunny days, so that it was difficult to believe we were creeping towards winter. But even before the middle of September, Robert developed his first cold of the season. I mentioned it at my post-natal check-up.
‘Is there anything I can do to stop the baby getting it?’ I asked.
But the doctor shook his head, saying, ‘Not a thing,’ and sure enough, in less than a week, Amanda had caught it.
It couldn’t have happened at a less convenient time. I was in the throes of preparing for a visit from Philippa and Colin on Sunday, and a few days after that was Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, when many of the least devout fast for twenty-five hours. It would be necessary to prepare special meals for the beginning and the end of the Fast, even though, on this occasion, I would merely restrict myself to eating simple foods during the day, as I was nursing a baby.
I had one dreadful night, when I was awoken constantly by Amanda crying; she was so blocked up that she was snuffling and snorting in discomfort. But in the morning, I was not sure whether to ring the doctor or not. He had not seemed to regard a cold as very serious, and I was reluctant to ask him to call unnecessarily. But I was without the car that day, and I didn’t want to take the baby out in the pram to the surgery. A good middle of the road course seemed to be to ring the local Health Visitor and get her advice. She asked if the baby was taking her feed and I told her that she was; in fact it had been the only way to comfort her during the night. The Health Visitor was reassuring—there was probably little to worry about, but she would try to come to see her if she could. But the next day she telephoned apologetically; she had been too busy to call round and wondered if I still wanted her to see the baby? Amanda was so much better that I was no longer worried, and told her not to come.
I had been so concerned about the effect of the usual infections upon Amanda, that as the cold passed, I felt quite elated. Philippa and Colleen’s visit on the following Sunday was a great success and our two boys, Robert and David, wandered off into the woods with the two Daddies, while I fed Amanda and chatted to Philippa, expecting a second baby herself at the end of the year. Philippa, who had sent us a telegram asking, ‘Can we have the wonderful recipe?’ had been impressed by our cleverness at producing a daughter, and made a great fuss of Amanda, for once dressed up in a frilly pink dress instead of one of her usual flannelette nighties.
‘Now that you’ve got a boy
and
a girl,’ she asked me, ‘would you have another?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered slowly. ‘I might still like to have three children, but it’s too early to say yet. At the moment, I’m just glad it’s all over and I don’t have to have another baby tomorrow.’
When tomorrow came, I still felt a sense of relief—relief still, that Amanda was better, and relief (as always) that a day of entertaining was over and I could collapse back into my usual routine. It was raining dismally outside and it was not a day for an ambitious programme.
Michael’s mother was away on holiday and that evening, we received a disturbing phone call from Sonia—things had gone hopelessly wrong, it seemed, and my mother-in-law had written unhappily from Majorca.
I was feeding the baby while they talked; she lay so contentedly in my arms, I couldn’t help feeling that this was more important than anything else in the world, even family problems. Not always an easy baby, I had had occasion to say many times in the last few weeks, ‘Madam Amanda, you’re far from “loveable”.’ But tonight she seemed at her best. After her feed she lay on a sheet on the floor, kicking her legs frantically, freed for the moment from the restriction of her nappy. Her eyes were alert as she followed the movements of her father. She seemed so different from the scraggy, screwed-up little creature delivered less than two months ago. Her eyes were blue and her cheeks smooth and rosy and she had learned to smile all of three weeks ago.
I was quite disappointed in her, when she reverted to her normal practice of crying when I put her in the carry-cot. She had been behaving so beautifully—I had quite thought she was growing out of her baby tantrums and would settle down to sleep contentedly. She’d been up quite long enough—it was nearly nine o’clock. I still had the washing up to do, and I’d left a pile of ironing on my bed, so as usual I ignored the fretful sounds and got down to work. But in the end, I was too tired to do the ironing. Michael and I just sat on the settee, and I couldn’t stop chuntering on about little Amanda—how bonny, how pretty she was—how she was going to charm all the young men, when she grew up—until Michael stopped me, saying, ‘You’ll give her a “nehora” (a curse)’. I was quite surprised at him—for he didn’t use all that many Jewish expressions, and wasn’t normally superstitious—and I told him so. Still he was soon back to his practical self, picking up the nappy bucket and heaving the contents into the washing machine (rather than fishing them out individually as I always did). I told him it was hardly worth the bother—there were only two or three nappies in there—but he took no notice and, running true to form, was still practically ready for bed before I’d even started to undress.
The pile of un-ironed washing was lying on the bed. I wondered afterwards if things would have been different if I had come in earlier to collect it.
In the darkness, I wandered slowly over to the cot to check the baby. She was right up at the top of the cot, squashed into the corner.
‘That doesn’t look very good,’ I remarked, slightly concerned.
‘Ssh, you’ll wake her,’ said Michael.
It was only two hours since she’d gone to bed.
‘She won’t wake up,’ I replied—then not liking the sound of the words, added, ‘Not until about two o’clock, anyway.’
I bent over the cot—she was a very quiet sleeper—I couldn’t hear a sound from her, and I moved her arm gently, but it fell back limply without response.
‘I can’t hear her breathing,’ I said, and put my head even closer to her. Still there was no sound. Michael came over and I waited for him to reassure me, but after a moment he said slowly, ‘There’s something wrong.’
With increasing fear I turned her over onto her back. My roughness should have disturbed her, but it didn’t and, suddenly panic-stricken, I rushed to turn on the light. It no longer mattered if I woke her. I had to have the reassurance that all was well.
But there was no reassurance in the little face in the cot. Her eyes, closed, were dark circles sunk in the ghastly white of her face. I heard myself say, ‘Oh my God!’ and, as if I were an observer, thought how theatrical the words sounded.
And then, quite calmly, as if an ice-cold automaton had taken over from me, I went over to our bedroom telephone and dialled the doctor’s number.
The impersonal tones of an operator answered.
‘What number are you calling?’
I reeled off the number, including the local code.
‘What exchange, caller?’
I racked my brains for a moment until the name of the exchange came to me.
‘You have to give me the name, not the code,’ he lectured.
For a moment the calm left me.
‘Will you hurry, this is an emergency!’
He gave me the number of another doctor on call. But it seemed pointless to bring a strange doctor here from further away. Instead I dialled 999.
Michael said he would take the car to the top of the lane, so that the ambulance would know where to come. I took the baby from the carry-cot and held her in my arms. Her body felt soft in the familiar flannelette nightie. Part of my mind was thinking, ‘It’s all a mistake; it’s all going to come out all right in the end. Things like this don’t happen to us. We’re just normal people.’
Michael rushed back in.
‘I can’t get the car to start!’
‘Never mind. Take the torch and walk up to the top of the lane and look out for the ambulance,’ I replied, calm in the dreadful knowledge that it wasn’t really going to matter.
I had never learned how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but I tried to breathe life into her and I gently massaged her heart. Was it my imagination? Did her skin take on a creamy colour? If she started to breathe now, would she be brain damaged? Surely she had been without oxygen too long. But I had to try.
The ambulance arrived. The men rushed into the house and seized Amanda from me, and I, almost reluctantly, gave her up.
There were a few seconds of indecision, when we realised that only one of us could go with the ambulance. Then it seemed natural that I should go and Michael should stay at home with Robert.
Automatically, I took a coat and got into the back of the ambulance. The ambulance man was trying to resuscitate the baby. All through the journey, he never stopped working on her. I was grateful for his efforts. But he must have known, as I did in my heart, that it was fruitless.
At the county hospital, I sat in a small waiting room. A very plump nurse brought me a cup of tea and I sat in front of an electric fire. The tea was sickly sweet. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick. I felt very hot, and yet incapable of removing my coat. I wished I had some cigarettes with me.
At last the nurse reappeared.
‘You know what I’m going to tell you,’ she said.
‘Is she….?’ I couldn’t say the word, the dreaded word, and I wanted her to say it, to make sure it was really true, but she didn’t. She just said, ‘Yes,’ and added in a confidential woman-to-woman manner, ‘The doctor didn’t want to see you. He’s very young.’
He thinks I’ll be screaming and hysterical
, I thought; I was only just bereaved, but already I had learned the first lesson. It was I that would make allowances for others and not vice versa.
The nurse had a long list of questions—I didn’t mind answering them. It didn’t feel so bad while I talked about the baby.
She talked on, telling me I could get sedatives if I needed them and tablets to stop the breast milk. I couldn’t see that it mattered whether I slept or not; the baby would still be dead when I awoke.
She told me she had lost a child too—an eighteen-month-old baby. I looked at her with amazement. She stood in front of me, plump, matter-of-fact and motherly—proof that one could actually survive this supremely awful happening.
‘How can I tell my little boy?’ I asked. ‘How will he take it?’ I felt a single tear run down my face—the only one I had shed.
‘I just told my child, “He’s gone to Jesus,” and we both howled.’
‘What about my parents—how will I tell them?’ I asked, but she just repeated what she had said.
She left me, to telephone Michael to tell him the news, and I was grateful to her for relieving me of that task.
‘How will he take it?’ she asked.
‘He’ll be all right,’ I replied. ‘He’s very strong.’
I sat alone in the room, in an empty void. Soon the ambulance men would come to take me home. I wished they would hurry. I wanted to be at home. The nurse had told me they were just having a cup of tea, and I did not begrudge them their break; the experience had been an ordeal for them too. Nevertheless, it seemed an age before they arrived.
‘Do you want to sit in the front?’ they asked.
‘Yes, it was quite sickly sitting in the back,’ I heard my voice reply, clearly, calmly. I got up between them and sat in the front seat, and for the twenty-minute duration of the journey, we sat in silence, and I gazed unseeingly out into the night, as the ambulance made its way out into the country.
As we pulled into our circular drive, the house seemed ablaze with light, as Michael had once promised. Even the front garden was floodlit, and in the illuminated circle, I saw Michael in jeans tinkering with the jacked-up car. It was so typical of him, I almost laughed; not for him, the pacing and twiddling of thumbs. He had to be doing something.
Even the colours of the dahlias were visible and, illogically, I wondered if the ambulance men had noticed them and understood that we were
normal
people—people who planted bulbs in spring and autumn—not people to whom tragedies happened.
I got out of the ambulance and fell into Michael’s arms, and together we went into the house, and as I stood paralysed by numbness, Michael clumsily undid the buttons of my coat. A button fell on the floor, and I wondered when I would get round to sewing it back on—if ever.